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Yowamushi Pedal: Spare Bike Spinoff Enters New Arc Focusing on Machimiya
posted on by Alex Mateo
Next year's January issue of Akita Shoten's Monthly Shōnen Champion announced on Tuesday that Wataru Watanabe's Yowamushi Pedal: Spare Bike spinoff manga will enter a new arc in the next issue on January 6, 2017. The arc will focus on Eikichi Machimiya, the "Fighting Dog of Kure" and student of Hiroshima Kureminami Technical School.
The Yowamushi Pedal: Spare Bike spinoff manga series follows the early years of the third-year students. The manga has profiled Jinpachi Tōdō and Yasutomo Arakita of Hakone Academy and Shingo Kinjō of Sohoku High. Watanabe publishes the manga irregularly in various Champion magazines and as extras bundled with the anime DVDs. Kinjō's arc began in Monthly Shōnen Champion last May, and the manga entered an arc centering on Kyoto Fushimi's Kōtarō Ishigaki last November.
The Yowamushi Pedal: Spare Bike anime adaptation began its two-week run in theaters in September. The anime has two parts, one focusing on Yūsuke Makishima and the other on Jinpachi Tōdō. Makishima's story details how he joined the Sōhoku bicycle racing club as a first year and met scorn from his seniors because of his strange style of dancing. Tōdō's story reveals how he first got into road racing in his second year of middle school, where a friend challenged him to a race but he initially refused because he wanted to avoid helmet hair.
The story of the original manga centers around Sakamichi Onoda, an otaku at Sōhoku High School. He loves anime and games so much, that he would ride his commuter bicycle to and from Tokyo's Akihabara shopping district in a 90-kilometer (about 60-mile) round trip over steep slopes after school. Onoda's life changes when he encounters his school's cycling team, and he ends up joining the competitive sport of bicycle racing.
Wataru Watanabe launched the original manga in Akita Shoten's Weekly Shōnen Champion magazine in 2008, and the story inspired stage plays and two television anime adaptations so far. The first season of the anime premiered in 2013, and Crunchyroll streamed the anime outside of Japan as it aired. The second season premiered in Japan in 2014, and ended in March 2015. Crunchyroll also streamed the second season outside of Japan as it aired.
